Virtual reality helps the elderly and disabled

Here I am, virtually at Penn State's Department of Architectural Engineering where President Obama's visit to a lab in the basement of our building closed the place down.

[This link gives news about the engineering building, but not about the ICON Lab's efforts to drastically reduce the costs of HEALTH CARE while improving efficiency:http://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/include/Obama-Web.pdf]

Immersed at the ICON lab of the engineering building, Professor John I. Messner

www.engr.psu.edu/ae/messner/

innovates to improve the effectiveness at serving patients and residents while reducing the cost of  designing and constructing:

• Hospitals
• Medical facilities
• Independent residents in apartments and apartment communities for individuals who are elderly or disabled

The ICON lab is a place where feverish work is being done feverishly.

If I were foolish enough to stop the progress and ask, my guess is that fellow VR [virtual reality] residents might not know that the acronym spells out Immersive Construction lab.

Informality is required. Even so, I do not want to waste the time of the people who are training me and are experts on such matters. I do, however, want to tell you, dear reader ALL about it and show you: For example, my quest in discovering how to draw a 3-D model in Sketchup...

Drawing in 3-D is easy. I have just created seemingly 40 foot high letters for the Yiddish expression OY VEY! and insert it to create a virtual model of my bedroom/study, where my bed, computer, power chair, and dirty clothes all surrounded by the 40 foot high letters. Then, the whole schmere will become a model after being inserted into a Unity-powered Revit gaming engine. Much of the lab's time is devoted to fostering creativity. I need to spend some time learning discipline, but at 63 old habits of outrageousness die hard.

I am going to take you to a virtual reality world called Second Life which gives a good sense of what immersion is all about.

The ICon lab has a rack with 3-D glasses. I will make sure you put them on so you can see everything and contemplate the problems of bringing reality to everyday concerns, such as making breakfast from a wheel chair where sink, stove, refrigerator, and cabinets are suitably modeled for reach and efficiency.

Right now, I have to write a script describing how a virtual resident in a virtual wheel chair goes about making coffee. [You might want to know what I am doing in ICon land at all; at some point I will get around to getting to the point.]

You will see the tools and understand what we learn from the environments in which they are played. For example, there is Blizzard Enterprise's facile gaming engine for War of Warcraft (WOW) Cataclysm Edition.

WOW is a game played by millions of people simultaneously from computers throughout the world. Twelve million users pay monthly gaming fees.

The video game industry has a lot to teach us about such currently difficult simulations to perform such as how to get a resident to transfer from a bed to a wheel chair. Transferring is responsible for significant and avoidable accidents. The investment in fast game engines, soon to be million dollar video cards, and pixel-friendly high cost huge screens is an investment in being able to create a level of detail sufficiently specific to do Good. As I have explained elsewhere, I am a Do-Gooder, who is addicted to fast scooters and power chairs and who may covert what I learn into designing The Perfect scooter. Since I have to be disabled I want to have some fun doing it. Also, I always like to tell a good story and how tomorrow is being built is a story I find fascinating..

There is, for example, the time, earlier today/yesterday when I downloaded Google Earth, entered the 3D world of playing with geography, using real satellites to do real or virtually real...[Words fail me.]
I entered Earth from my computer in the mijddle of the Pacific Ocean, zipped over to Mongolia getting bored by the Gobi Desert. I entered State College by way of flights over North Carolina, where daughter Amelia attends UNC Ashville, and over DC, where elder daughter Joanna is currently driving an ambulance.

In the eternal question, What is real and what isn't? Google not only has immersed me in the real world, but it provides a flight simulator so I can experience that world from a virtual jet with virtual controls. I plan to dazzle you with photos I took from my armchair geographical je ne sais pas. It is time to post and live to model and tell for another day.




From the ICon website  http://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/cic/facilities/icon/ :

"The Immersive Construction (ICon) Lab contains an affordable immersive projection display which allows 3-D and 4-D models to be displayed in stereo at full scale. The purpose of the lab is to facilitate the effective use of virtual reality (VR) techniques in design, construction and other disciplines. Our aim is to develop low cost, easy to use and easy to administer VR systems to facilitate their deployment in the Architecture/Engineering/Construction (AEC) Industry and throughout engineering and architectural academic programs."

Control click the link to see the photos: http://www.engr.psu.edu/ae/cic/facilities/icon/

I reach the ICON lab by way of a  slow elevator where the elevator walls are pasted with many photographs of helicopter pioneers. Second floor helicopter simulator; third floor ICON lab.